EU Data Governance Act and recent advances in technology provide a unique momentum to automate and expand livestock data collection, integration and exploitation by strengthening the coordination of efforts of science and industry. The ultimate goal of Digi4Live is to increase the capacity of livestock sector actors across Europe to benefit from data generating and digital technologies. By using a strong multi-actor and co-creation approach, which brings together livestock sector actors from farm to fork, from science to livestock and technology industries, competent authorities, and other key actors, and engages them in co-creation of digital & data concepts, Digi4Live enables greater use of current and new data & digital technologies in livestock tracking. Digi4Live is a 4.5 years coordination and support action that is reaching out to over 1000 organisations and initiatives across Europe to make an impact towards economically, environmentally and socially sustainable, digitalised livestock business that meets consumers’ expectations, more effective public administration and impactful policy. Digi4Live boosts the creation of standards and harmonised regulations, thus eliminating technical barriers for data and new data-generating technologies, and provides evidence on economic, social and environmental impacts of data-driven solutions in the livestock sector and boosts collaboration between R&I initiatives across all EU member states and beyond. It will point out how public administration and policy monitoring & assessment, businesses and consumers can benefit from digital technologies. Concepts for greater exploitation of data will be co-developed and examined in six thematic case study hubs and brought to the attention of end users to. Such an integrated approach can really make a difference by enabling substantially improved use of data for the benefit of science, policy and business. The project will provide policy and business conclusions.

SMARTER will develop and deploy innovative strategies to improve Resilience and Efficiency (R&E) related traits in sheep and goats. SMARTER will find these strategies by: i) generating and validating novel R&E related traits at a phenotypic and genetic level ii) improving and developing new genome-based solutions and tools relevant for the data structure and size of small ruminant populations, iii) establishing new breeding and selection strategies for various breeds and environments that consider R&E traits . SMARTER with help from stakeholders chose several key R&E traits including feed efficiency, health (resistance to disease, survival) and welfare. Experimental populations will be used to identify and dissect new predictors of these R&E traits and the trade-off between animal ability to overcome external challenges. SMARTER will estimate the underlying genetic and genomic variability governing these R&E related traits. This variability will be related to performance in different environments including genotype-by-environment interactions (conventional, agro-ecological and organic systems) in commercial populations. The outcome will be accurate genomic predictions for R&E traits in different environments across different breeds and populations. SMARTER will also create a new cooperative European and international initiative that will use genomic selection across countries. This initiative will make selection for R&E traits faster and more efficient. SMARTER will also characterize the phenotype and genome of traditional and underutilized breeds. Finally, SMARTER will propose new breeding strategies that utilise R&E traits and trade-offs and balance economic, social and environmental challenges. The overall impact of the multi-actor SMARTER project will be ready-to-use effective and efficient tools to make small ruminant production resilient through improved profitability and efficiency.